Thursday, December 31, 2015

(I figured out how to sign back into this blog to post at least ONCE in 2015, sorry for the absence. I'm afraid many of the post ideas I have in my head are even bleaker than this one, but I'll try to balance it out with upbeat posts about what I did in 2015. Also I'm ready to finally update the blogroll soon for the first time in years. The following post was posted elsewhere online and got some "likes" though no comments from the people involved, so I'm a bit nervous.)

A BELATED POST ON LOSS AND WRITING. This is a selfish post. Maybe
I'll write a less selfish one later, but here's where I am at now. Two
weeks ago the week started with the one-year anniversary of the death of
a writer friend, Lee Sandlin. I never wrote here about his
passing--which I learned while checking my phone at a hockey game with a
friend; I said nothing there--because I was so emotional at the time. I
was sad for those close to him, sad I hadn't gotten to know him better,
sad we wouldn't get more writing from him, but the fiercest hurt was
that...he was there as the person I wanted to FIRST read the personal
writing I was working on. Even though I only did this at one lunch with
him, he was who I thought of when the many pieces I imagined the past
few years (on visiting bars, on a bartender friend, on the
horrible events of 2013 [which I have not discussed here] and how I've handled things since, on exploring
abandoned buildings, etc.) swirled in my head. Losing Lee was a loss of
hope about writing, but I couldn't express it at the memorial events for
him because it seemed like a strange, selfish response.

That
week two weeks ago ended with learning of the hiatus/closure of the hugely influential, indispensable Chicago website Gapers
Block (explained in this much-shared link by editor Andrew Huff, http://gapersblock.com/goodbye/), a website that's in one way or another responsible for how I know so many
people and places in the city, a part of my life for over half my years
here. They'd used many of my Flickr photos for "Rearview" (photo of the
day) and it was thrilling, even if that very day I was cranky none of my
photos had been picked in months. (And I don't think any were in 2015, while seemingly every Flickr dude I know had 5 or 10 photos used in that time. I know I'm terrible for pointing this out, but GB was what's kept me posting to Flickr occasionally while I have an almost unusable computer.)

Even more than that, they were a
place where I potentially could have my writing published. I'd talked
about so many ideas with Andrew over the years and had trouble getting
them executed, but GB was always there as a hope. A place I could
potentially get my start like so many other Chicago writers (I mean my
start to a wider world beyond this infrequent blog). I
visited a different bar every day in January 2013 as a project and on
the final day, at a Gapers Block bar meetup, they said I should write it up
as a story. I still haven't. I visited 100+ other bars that year, many
more since, and because bars became such a huge part of my life in
terrible ways and wonderful ways, I've been overwhelmed with how to
wrestle that into a coherent story. But it was there as a place I could
publish. Though I saw how much of the work was carried out by Andrew and
how so many other worthy Chicago media outlets disappeared and thought
"well, just so I write the piece while GB is still around." Then...the
news that Friday afternoon, and again I was stunned, and again I felt
hopeless. I definitely wasn't upset at him for the decision, but I was
extremely hard on myself for my failure to finish anything. I
ended up with one of my drinking-and-posting-too-much-embarrassing-stuff-on-social-media
nights.

As with Lee's passing, I took the Gapers Block news
personally in a way that felt like a loss of hope about my writing, and
in both cases I felt guilty that that was my response, like what's WRONG
with me that I make it about ME and my feelings about writing?! There's
a downward spiral here tied in with a difficult year and a number of other
losses (that week I was also freaking out that my bartender friend
who'd helped me so much after a trauma had disappeared, and that I failed to submit to
an essay anthology I've desperately wanted to), because in most cases I
haven't had replacements for the people and things I've lost. (Photographer friends, road trip friends, friends to talk to late at night, favorite bar, favorite sports team...) I'm
embarrassed that this all prevented me from effectively saying the
public things I needed to about these writers. The thank yous, the best wishes, the we've
been lucky to have you for however long.

see also

Trying--for real this time--to blog regularly, but I do get distracted by adventures to abandoned factories filled with parade floats (see above) and such. (And sorry right now the blogroll's a couple years out of date.)